PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua (Reuters) - Soldiers searched for more bodies on Thursday after Hurricane Felix killed 38 people in Nicaragua, while 52 members of a group of Miskito Indians washed ashore alive in neighboring Honduras.
Dozens were still missing after Felix tore into Nicaragua's swampy Caribbean coast late on Tuesday, destroying thousands of flimsy homes and making tracks through barely developed jungle areas even less passable than normal.
But local government officials said 52 bedraggled Miskitos, mainly fishermen, washed up in the Honduran port of Raya near the Nicaraguan border after being swept off a tiny island and surviving the storm clinging to boards and lifebuoys.
"Fifty-two Nicaraguan Miskitos, part of the 150 or so that had disappeared, were found in Honduran waters," Carolina Echeverria, a deputy from Cabo Gracias a Dios on the border with Nicaragua, told Reuters by telephone.
"They were holding onto planks and buoys for hours," she said, after speaking to officials in Raya by radio.
She said around half of the survivors were in good enough health to be sent home on Thursday on a Nicaraguan Navy boat, while the other half were being taken to hospital in Honduras for treatment for exposure.
The turtle-fishing Miskito Indians, who live mainly in wooden shacks in isolated marshlands dotted with lagoons and crocodile-infested rivers, were hard hit by Felix. Some 35,000 Miskitos live in Honduras and more than 100,000 in Nicaragua.
Echeverria said the survivors had been on a small key fishing for lobster when the storm approached, and many more may still be unaccounted for.
RIVERS NEAR BURSTING
In Nicaragua, soldiers combed the area around Puerto Cabezas for more casualties while the Navy tried to reach settlements on marshy spits of land or on keys.
Felix crashed into the coast on Tuesday as an extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane but was downgraded to a tropical depression by Wednesday evening as it moved westward and drenched already waterlogged southeastern Mexico with rain.
Nicaraguan disaster prevention chief Col. Ramon Arnesto put the death toll there at 38, with dozens believed missing.
"There are a lot of missing people," he told reporters on Wednesday, as people wept at the harbor in Puerto Cabezas for a dozen fishermen they said had not returned.
Visiting the area on Wednesday, President Daniel Ortega said about 9,000 homes had been destroyed. Residents and soldiers battled to clear the streets of uprooted trees.
"We are talking about really serious damage," Ortega said.
Felix revived memories throughout Central America of Hurricane Mitch, which killed 10,000 people in 1998.
In the early hours of Thursday Felix's eye was grinding through western Honduras, dropping sheets of rain. It left the capital Tegucigalpa relatively unscathed but flooded villages in the north and left rivers close to bursting their banks.
There were no reports of deaths in Honduras but local media said some 25,000 people were evacuated from their homes.
Felix came on the heels of another deadly Category 5 storm, Hurricane Dean, marking the first time on record that two Atlantic storms made landfall as Category 5 hurricanes in one season. Dean killed 27 people in the Caribbean and Mexico.
In Mexico, Hurricane Henriette lost strength as it drenched northern states on Thursday after lashing Los Cabos and killing seven people as it tore through the Gulf of California this week. Two more people were reported dead late on Wednesday in northern Sonora state.
(Additional reporting by Gustavo Palencia and Noel Randewich in Tegucigalpa and Ivan Castro in Managua)
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